Can I just say I am really glad we have a leader like Obama in office to deal with this issue right now? Does sarcasm make itself known easily through written word?
Ukraine
- Thread starter just me
- Start date
I expect the Ukraine to split
The Russians have secured the crimea whilst a referendum is arranged to see if the people there want to join the russian federation or the EU; the crimean politicians have already voted to join the russian federation
I also said the Ukrainians would take a loan from the IMF which in the future they will fail to pay back. They will default on the loan because their economy is in tatters and in return the IMF will do what it has done elsewhere and it will insist that the government privatise its assets and sell them off in firesales; the global oligarchs will then buy up everything in Ukraine. Meanwhile the ukrainian economy will nosedive so badly from the austerity that it will see an exodus of its young going to seek work elsewhere
Putin had offered them billions of euros of debt relief but they have refused that because their leaders who have created this coup and who have now put themselves in power are part of the global oligarchy (who are trying to centralise their power more and more and they use debt as a weapon to enslave people)
So in brief:
- a split in the ukraine
- an IMF loan
- a default on the loan
- a nosedive in ukrainian economy seeing an exodus of workers out of the country
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Obama is just a puppet
The politicians are no more than administrators....middle managers. They are put there to distract you with political theatre. the power is the MONEY. Where money is concentrated power is concentrated. The power in the US is with the big monied interests that fund the political campaigns of the politicians
Obama will come and go but the big money families will still be there pulling the strings behind the scenes when obama is a distant memory....i've seen a lot of politicians come and go but its always business as usual because really they all work for big money
thing is, Ukraine appears to be completely corrupt with nothing left to auction off to the western oligarchs.
https://ukraineanalysis.wordpress.com/category/corruption/
Its not just the loss of the countrys assets including the land itself it is that to pay the interest on the IMF loan the government will enforce a programme of 'austerity' on the people which will see a movement of public wealth into a small number of private hands
This will destroy public services, stop spending and destroy the economy in a negative feedback loop
you mean the public services that are already defunct and corrupted or a shadow set of public services?
no doubt the ukrainian economy is in shambles and the IMF will demand (imo stupid) austerity measures, but the country has already been looted.
no doubt the ukrainian economy is in shambles and the IMF will demand (imo stupid) austerity measures, but the country has already been looted.
Russia has its problems but russia has called for a 'multi-polar world' whereas the rothschilds are trying to create a 'unipolar' world
If people think that national governments are encroaching more and more on our civil liberties and moving closer to a totalitarian state due to the increased centralisation of power (and wealth) then imagine how bad things would be under a centrally controlled global government
This is really a question of whether or not we want to hand over all decision making powers to a group of central bankers and blue bloods (neo-fuedalism) or whether we want to de-centralise power down closer to the people
The US created a war economy through having germany and japan as enemies in WWI. The oligarchs controlling the corporations that provide weapons, supplies and oil for war made a lot of money out of that; the bankers who gave war loans made a lot of money out of that. War is a racket as general smedley butler said
Next they made russia an enemy and they continued making weapons throughout the cold war making vast profits and filling the world up with destructive nukes.
Then they needed a new bogeyman so they created the 'war on terror' which is vaguely waged against muslims in general it would seem; people are beginning to see through the war on terror now though so the military industrial complex needs a new bogeyman....so Russia is back in the firing line!
Just endless war until the people rise up and say 'enough' and take the power off the corporations
Putin paid off the countries debts to the Rothschilds. He has also brought the countries resources under the control of nationalised companies. What the rothschilds hate is countries that are energy self sufficient. Libya was energy self sufficient so they destroyed it, Iraq was energy self sufficient so they destroyed it, Iran is energy self sufficient so they cretaed a coup there in the past and are now trying to destroy it, venezuala is energy self sufficient so they are trying to destroy it, scotland could be energy self sufficient so they want to stop it becoming independent and so on
They want to monopolise control of all the worlds resources
Russia is standing against that.
Your government is preparing for a fight against its own people, stockpiling bullets and training its soldiers to do house to house searches. Its not russia that is trying to control you...its your own government
An ex CIA pilot and the son of the inventor of the learjet has given a sworn statement that it would have been impossible for the 911 hijakers to manouvre the planes the way they did into the two towers. However drone technology or tomahawk technology could have done it of course
So if 911 is an inside job then you need to be asking who did that...who really attacked your country....and it wasn't russia!
http://neonnettle.com/news/211-ex-c...nes-hit-the-twin-towers#.UxXRUAhgiZQ.facebook
Its not russia trying to take your guns away or placing you under greater and greater surveillance
That looting was overseen by the western powers as the country broke off from the USSR. There was a similar grab of resources by oligarchs in russia (many of them rothschild men who putin has been struggling with)
The article you've posted blames western restructuring (influence). Note how the west is also causing economic oligarchism in their own countries...they love centralisation of wealth and power...its their raison d'etre
They have also had the colour revolution there already which was fomented by George Soros through his open society insitute (rothschild front man)
What ukraine should have done is acted like hungary and thrown off the influence of the IMF and international bankers but instead it has put the oligarchs in power who are running to the IMF causing the pro-russian faction in the country to run the other way to russia = SPLIT
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yes
The political system in the US is completely dominated by money
The political campaigns of politicians are paid for by financial contributors. Those contributors are invariably the big corporations as they have the most money and therefore the most political clout
In europe there are certain bloodline families that make up the royal families of europe and the landed aristocracy of europe. The aristocratic families with the strongest links to the vatican church are called the 'black nobility'.
The church has been one of the biggest land owners in europe along with the aristocrats and royals. The church has also played the part of 'king maker' over the centuries.
Beneath these groups of royals, nobles and priests are the people. This social stratification is called 'the three estates'
The royals and aristocrats traditionally could not commit usury so they would hire jews to do it for them as they had no relgious prohibition on usury. Each european town/city would have a jewish quarter called a 'ghetto' where the jewish merchants would live
Some jewish families such as the rothschilds became bankers to the royal families. They created a banking network that spanned europe and they lent money to both sides in many wars making vast sums form war loans
All these groups form a network. The visible manifestation of their power is the corporations that they own. The concept of a corporation was created to sheild the owners from legal and economic liability in the event of failure. These corporations are often interlocking and overlapping with for example the same people sitting on different boards. The corporations are also constantly consolidating into larger and larger entities
The underlying manifestation of this network is the secret society network which binds the groups together into a cohesive social and political force. So for example although the netwoek might place its people...its 'gatekeepers' in positions of influence in various insitutions for example the legal courts, the police, government, the intelligence agencies, the military, the media and so on these people can then come together in various secret societies and clubs and rub shoulders with each other
They have a shared goal which is the preservation of their privileged situation at the top of society feeding off the general populace (who do the work).
Another visible but often secretive manifestation of the network are the think tanks for example: the trilateral commission, the council on foreign relations (CFR), the club of rome, chatham house etc
The knights templar also got into banking and continue in banking to this day in the city of london banking district which is a legally autonomous enclave within the UK
Other legally autonomous enclaves are the vatican city in Rome (another state within a state) and the District Of Columbia in Washington (which houses the US intelligence agencies, the white house and the supreme council of the scottish rite freemasonry)
These three districts form the: administrative, banking and religious centres of the network
The vatican has two popes. there is the visible pope called the 'white pope' and there is the head of the secretive jesuit order who are modelled on the knights templar; he is called 'the black pope'
The aristocratic branch of the protestant orange lodges is interestingly enough called the royal black perceptory
So whenever you dig into events the same groups always crop up: the freemasons, the vatican and the jewish central bankers
The central banking families own the 4 biggest banks in the US which in turn own the federal reserve central bank. They also own the bank of england central bank as well as other central banks in other countries. They are headquartered in the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in switzerland.
When the templars were persecuted in france they fled to switzerland and scotland among other places. Switzerland and scotland (and city of london) are famous for their banking even today. The mercenary guards of the vatican are recruited from switzerland
This corporate network of intermarried bloodlines who are all involved i occult secret societies control the economies of various countries and they control the political and legal scene of various countries.
The big 4 banks also own the biggest 4 oil companies and many wars in the middle east are fought over oil. The british royal family also have shares in big oil for example in Royal Dutch Shell
Just as the Bush presidents were called oilmen for their close ties to the oil industry Obama is often called wallstreets man because of his close ties to wallstreet. Not only does wallstreet fund him politically but obama has surrounded himself with wallstreet advisors:
http://www.factcheck.org/2012/02/oba...et-executives/
http://politicaloutcast.com/2014/01/...eet-president/
The aim of this network is to centralise power even further. They want to create a global government which they will control. People will not get to vote or have any say in that government they will just be told what to do
This is the 'New World Order' (NWO) that various politicians can be heard talking about. Various events around the world right now are occuring because of the attempts of the network to create this new world order
However not all countries share their vision of a centrally controlled world
For example the BRICS nations of emerging industrial powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China & South Africa) do not want to kow tow to the new world order and are forming their own trading blocks to be self sufficent
In south america the same process is happening with socialist governments being elected in for example venezuala and ecuador who are forming tarding blocks such a 'ALBA' to operate out of the control of the NWO
This is why countries like venezuala are having problems at the moment because the NWO are funding through the CIA the right wing (richest, biggest landowners and corporate powers) elements of venezuala to rise up and try to otherthrow the government in order to bring venezuala back under the control of the NWO; this is why the NWO poisoned Hugo Chavez
Russia and china don't want a 'unipolar' world (where power is centralised in one place) they want a 'multipolar' world where power is spread around the world
So there are 2 visions for a new world order amongst the worlds super powers
Here is an article giving the russian/chinese perspective:
http://rt.com/news/russian-chinese-relations-expert/
So why would i not support the US/UK/Israel vision on a new world order? because it is centralised power and undemocratic and will see us all turned into the neo-fuedal slaves of the network, with no say in things and no rights; i think the public need to create their own vision for the future and work together to create that without the corrupt government which is owned and controlled by the network
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/07/crimea-putin-vs-reality/?insrc=hpss
Crimea: Putin vs. Reality
Timothy Snyder
This is the third installment in Timothy Snyder’s series on Russian ideology and the Ukrainian revolution. Earlier articles examined the Kremlin’s Eurasian ideology and its propaganda about the Kiev uprising.
Yury Kirnichny/AFP/Getty Images
Ukrainian members of parliament watching Russian President Vladimir Putin's press conference, March 4, 2014
The Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula is a disaster for the European peacetime order. But more critical still is just what Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks he is doing. The clues are there before us, in the language of the Kremlin’s non-stop propaganda campaign in the Russian media. The repeatedly recycled categories are the “fascist coup” in Ukraine and the “Russian citizens” who suffer under it. Putin’s justification for occupying part of Ukraine, and threatening to invade the entire country, has been to save the Russians there from the fascists.
Let’s consider each of these conceits in turn. Did the current Ukrainian authorities come to power in a fascist coup? As everyone who has followed these events knows, the mass protests against the Yanukovych regime that began in November involved millions of people, from all walks of life. After the regime tried and failed to put down the protests by shooting protestors from rooftops on February 20, EU negotiators arranged a deal whereby Yanukovych would cede power to parliament. Rather than signing the corresponding legislation, as he had committed to do, Yanukovych fled to Russia.
Parliament declared that he had abandoned his responsibilities, followed the protocols that applied to such a case, and continued the process of constitutional reform by itself. Presidential elections were called for May, and a new government was formed. The prime minister is a liberal conservative, one of the two deputy prime ministers is Jewish, and the governor of the important eastern province of Dnipropetrovsk is the president of the Congress of Ukrainian Jewish Organizations. Although one can certainly debate the constitutional nuances, this process was not a coup. And it certainly was not fascist. Reducing the powers of the president, calling presidential elections, and restoring the principles of democracy are the opposite of what fascism would demand. Leaders of the Jewish community have declared their unambiguous support for the new government and their total opposition to the Russian invasion.
Of the eighteen cabinet posts that have been filled in the new government, three are held by members of the far right party, Svoboda. Its leader had less than 2 percent support in a recent opinion poll—one that was taken after the Russian invasion of Crimea, an event that presumably would help the nationalists. In any event, this is the grain of truth from which, according to the traditional rules of propaganda, Putin’s “fascist coup” has been concocted.
The second conceit, that of the oppression of Russian citizens in the Ukraine, lacks even this. Over the last few months one Russian citizen has been killed in Ukraine. He was not threatened by Ukrainian protestors or by the current government. Quite the opposite. He was fighting for the Ukrainian revolution, and was killed by a sniper’s bullet.
In any case, since Ukraine does not allow double citizenship, there are few Russian citizens resident in the country. But let’s consider those that are: One notable group are the soldiers and sailors at the military base at Sevastopol. Since these are military men on a military base, they hardly need protection. Another major group are those masked Russian special-forces who are now occupying Crimea. A third are the Russians who have been bused across the border to stage pro-Russian demonstrations and beat Ukrainian students in the cities of eastern Ukraine. A final group of Russian citizens are former Ukrainian riot policemen who took part in the suppression of demonstrations. Having been rewarded for their actions with a Russian passport, they can and do travel to Russia. None of these groups, by any stretch of the imagination, could be plausibly described as a victimized minority requiring protection.
Putin and others blur the category of citizenship by speaking of Russian “compatriots,” a category that has no legal status. By compatriots Putin means people the Russian government claims as Russians—or who, according to the Kremlin, self-identify as Russians—and who therefore need its protection. This sort of argument, the need to protect the Volksgenossen, was used to significant effect by Adolf Hitler in 1938 in enunciating German claims to Austria and then to the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s substitution of ethnicity for state borders led then to the Munich conference, appeasement, and World War II. Russian historian Andrei Zubov has developed the comparison with Nazi aggression further, likening Putin’s action to the Anschluss, and recalling that the Anschluss led to a war that turned against its authors. The parallel has also been noted by the chief rabbi of Ukraine.
Even if the protection of Volksgenossen were legally justified, it is simply not clear who these people might be. It is true that Ukrainians speak Russian, but that does not make them Russian, any more than my writing in English makes me English. The language issue can be confusing. Ukrainian citizens are usually bilingual, in Ukrainian and Russian. Russians, like the targets of their propaganda, are rarely bilingual. So it has been all too easy to equate the capacity to speak Russian with a Russian identity that is in need of protection from Russia. Some citizens of Ukraine of course do see themselves as Russians—about 17 percent of the population—but this does not mean that they are subject to discrimination or indeed that they identify with the Russian state. Even in Crimea, where the emotional connections to the Ukrainian state are weakest, only 1 percent of the population identifies Russia as its homeland.
In a number of recent protests, Russian-speaking Ukrainians and members of the Russian ethnic minority in eastern Ukraine have made clear they categorically reject any claim that they need Russian protection. One petition from Russian speakers and Russians in Ukraine asks Putin to leave Ukrainian citizens alone to solve their own problems. It has been signed by 140,000 people. This might seem remarkable, since everyone signing it knows that he or she will be in the bad graces of the Russian authorities if Russia completes its invasion. But it makes perfect sense. Russians in Ukraine enjoy basic political rights, whereas Russians in the Russian Federation do not.
Sergii Kharchenko/NurPhoto/Corbis
Unmarked Russian forces surrounding a Ukrainian marine base in Perevalne, Crimea, March 6, 2014
In view of its patent absurdity, why is this propaganda so important to Putin’s regime? Most obviously, propaganda serves the technical purpose of preparing the way for war. An excellent propaganda apparatus, such as the Russian one, can find ways to repeat its message over and over again in slightly different ways and formats. Plenty of people in the West now spread Russian propaganda, sometimes for money, sometimes from ignorance, and sometimes for reasons best known to themselves. Those who repeat the Russian propaganda conceits do not need to convince everyone, only to set the terms of debate. If people in free societies have their discussions framed for them by rulers of unfree societies, then they will not notice the history unfolding around them (a revolution just happened in Europe!) or sense the urgency of formulating policy in a desperate situation (a European country has just invaded another!). Propaganda can serve this technical purpose no matter how absurd it is.
But propaganda has a deeper and more important function. Propaganda, at least in the old Soviet Union, was not an edited version of reality, but rather a crucial part of the endeavor to create a different reality. When we refute propaganda with facts and arguments, and even when we discuss its social function, we are inhabiting a certain mental world; we accept the constraints of observation and reason at the outset and seek to change our situation on the basis of what we think we can see and understand. But this is not the only possible psychic reality. In the Soviet Union, the assumption among many who believed in the promise of communism was that the future was as real if not more real than the present. Soviet propaganda was not a version of the world in which we live but rather a representation of the world to come. When we see Russia’s current propaganda in this way, we understand why its authors are utterly untroubled by what might appear to be factual errors and contradictions.
Take the idea of Jewish Nazis, which must be taken on if the current Kremlin propaganda about the revolution in Kiev is to have any logical basis. The claim is that Nazis made a coup; the observable reality is that some of the people now in power are Jews. And then we evince our skepticism that Jews are Nazis or that a Nazi coup would put Jews at the top of the Ukrainian state apparatus.
But in the ideology of the Soviet Union and its communist allies, the identification of Jews with Nazis was convenient for those who were in power, and so Jewish Nazis became a propaganda reality. In the years before Stalin’s death Israel became part of an international plot that was directed by fascists in the capitalist West. After the Six-Day War the Soviets presented Israeli soldiers and citizens as imitators of the Wehrmacht and the SS. This propaganda was followed by the expulsion of Jews from communist Poland. The fact that Jews left Poland for Israel and the US was presented as evidence that they were fascists all along. The regimes found it politically useful for their own future to target Jews, and therefore Jews, so to speak, were made to become Nazis.
Propaganda is thus not a flawed description, but a script for action. If we consider Putin’s propaganda in these Soviet terms, we see that the invasion of Crimea was not a reaction to an actual threat, but rather an attempt to activate a threat so that violence would erupt that would change the world. Propaganda is part of the action it is meant to justify. From this standpoint, an invasion from Russia would lead to a Ukrainian nationalist backlash that would make the Russian story about fascists, so to speak, retrospectively true. If Ukraine is unable to hold elections, it looks less like a democracy. Elections are scheduled, but cannot be held in regions occupied by a foreign power. In this way, military action can make propaganda seem true. Even the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe is unable to fulfill an observation mission.
Indeed, in his March 4 press conference, Putin claimed that the Ukrainian state no longer exists as such, and therefore is not protected by treaties or law. This is quite a radical position, recalling the conclusions that Nazi lawyers drew about Poland after the German invasion of that country in 1939. The position of statelessness would seem to authorize any military action whatsoever without legal restrictions, since Ukraine is in this view a lawless zone.
When the parliament of the Russian Federation (in an appropriately old-fashioned Soviet-style unanimous vote) authorized Putin to use military force throughout Ukraine, it defined the war aim as the restoration of “social and political normality.” This is effective rhetoric, as it slips in the implication that what is actually happening in the world, the actual politics and society of actual Ukraine, is not normal. It is also a formulation with terrifying implications. How much violence and how many generations would be necessary before Ukraine society was “normalized,” that is, until the supposedly artificial and Western idea of democracy was eliminated, and the supposedly invented Ukrainian national identity was forgotten? The costs to Russians and Ukrainians alike would be staggering, almost unbelievable.
We might not see the new reality that the Russian propaganda is preparing the ground for, but it seems likely that Putin, at least at times, is already inhabiting it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel—an East German and a Russian speaker who knows a thing or two about communism—has remarked that Putin was living “in another world.” But what if the propaganda, as effective as it has been in dulling the sensibilities of Westerners, fails to bring that world into being?
As Putin sat slouched in his chair at his press conference, shifting between clever one-liners and contradictory constructions, he seemed to be struggling to reconcile tactics and ideology. On the one hand, he has been an extremely good tactician, far more nimble and ruthless than almost anyone with whom he deals. He carried off his plan in Crimea with panache. He broke all the rules in an act of violence that should have opened a space for the true world, the world he wants, the glorious Russian gathering of Russian lands and peoples.
Yet dramatic action did not summon the envisioned new reality to life. Ukraine did not reveal itself to be a Russian land unhappily and temporarily ruled by a few fascists whose coup could be undone. It looks instead like a place where the revolutionary mood has been consolidated by a foreign invasion. As the chief rabbi of Ukraine put it a few days ago: “There were many differences of opinion throughout the revolution, but today all that is gone.” He continued: “We’re faced by an outside threat called Russia. It’s brought everyone together.”
There are now protests against the Russian occupation throughout the country, even in the south and east, where most people watch Russian television and where the economy is closely linked to Russia. Ukrainians who just a few days ago were in conflict with one another over their own revolution are now protesting together under the same flag. There have been violent clashes, as for example in Kharkiv, but these have been caused by busloads of Russians brought from across the border. It seems unlikely that the beatings of Ukrainian students by Russian “tourists” (as the Ukrainians, with typical humor, call them) will lead Ukrainians to think that they are Russian compatriots.
The unmarked uniforms of the Russian special forces in Crimea tell this story all by themselves. Theirs was supposed to be the rapid gesture that changed the world. But with each day that passes those ski masks and unmarked uniforms look instead like symbols of shame, hesitation, lack of responsibility—indeed denial of reality. In the Crimean sunshine black ops begin to look a little gray. It must have been enjoyable for Putin to run an operation in which his troops could pretend to be from nowhere. But it was oddly childish of him to deny, in his press conference, what everyone knew: that the troops were Russians. It was as though he wanted the tactical play to last as long as possible, to dream just a bit longer. Ukrainian sailors in Crimea answered him quite sharply, in brisk Russian sentences much better formulated than Putin’s own.
The costs of what Russia has done are very real, for Europe, for Ukraine, and for Russia itself. Russian propaganda has elegantly provided a rationale for Russian tactics and articulately defined a Russian dream for Ukraine. But in the end propaganda is all that unites the tactics and the dream, and that unity turns out to be wishful. There is no actual policy, no strategy, just a talented and tortured tyrant oscillating between mental worlds that are connected only by a tissue of lies. Putin faces a choice: use far more violence, in the hope that another surge will finally make the dream come true, or seek an exit in which he can claim some victory—which would be wise but deflating. He appears to feel the weight of this choice.
March 7, 2014, 1:25 p.m.
Crimea: Putin vs. Reality
Timothy Snyder
This is the third installment in Timothy Snyder’s series on Russian ideology and the Ukrainian revolution. Earlier articles examined the Kremlin’s Eurasian ideology and its propaganda about the Kiev uprising.
Yury Kirnichny/AFP/Getty Images
Ukrainian members of parliament watching Russian President Vladimir Putin's press conference, March 4, 2014
The Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula is a disaster for the European peacetime order. But more critical still is just what Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks he is doing. The clues are there before us, in the language of the Kremlin’s non-stop propaganda campaign in the Russian media. The repeatedly recycled categories are the “fascist coup” in Ukraine and the “Russian citizens” who suffer under it. Putin’s justification for occupying part of Ukraine, and threatening to invade the entire country, has been to save the Russians there from the fascists.
Let’s consider each of these conceits in turn. Did the current Ukrainian authorities come to power in a fascist coup? As everyone who has followed these events knows, the mass protests against the Yanukovych regime that began in November involved millions of people, from all walks of life. After the regime tried and failed to put down the protests by shooting protestors from rooftops on February 20, EU negotiators arranged a deal whereby Yanukovych would cede power to parliament. Rather than signing the corresponding legislation, as he had committed to do, Yanukovych fled to Russia.
Parliament declared that he had abandoned his responsibilities, followed the protocols that applied to such a case, and continued the process of constitutional reform by itself. Presidential elections were called for May, and a new government was formed. The prime minister is a liberal conservative, one of the two deputy prime ministers is Jewish, and the governor of the important eastern province of Dnipropetrovsk is the president of the Congress of Ukrainian Jewish Organizations. Although one can certainly debate the constitutional nuances, this process was not a coup. And it certainly was not fascist. Reducing the powers of the president, calling presidential elections, and restoring the principles of democracy are the opposite of what fascism would demand. Leaders of the Jewish community have declared their unambiguous support for the new government and their total opposition to the Russian invasion.
Of the eighteen cabinet posts that have been filled in the new government, three are held by members of the far right party, Svoboda. Its leader had less than 2 percent support in a recent opinion poll—one that was taken after the Russian invasion of Crimea, an event that presumably would help the nationalists. In any event, this is the grain of truth from which, according to the traditional rules of propaganda, Putin’s “fascist coup” has been concocted.
The second conceit, that of the oppression of Russian citizens in the Ukraine, lacks even this. Over the last few months one Russian citizen has been killed in Ukraine. He was not threatened by Ukrainian protestors or by the current government. Quite the opposite. He was fighting for the Ukrainian revolution, and was killed by a sniper’s bullet.
In any case, since Ukraine does not allow double citizenship, there are few Russian citizens resident in the country. But let’s consider those that are: One notable group are the soldiers and sailors at the military base at Sevastopol. Since these are military men on a military base, they hardly need protection. Another major group are those masked Russian special-forces who are now occupying Crimea. A third are the Russians who have been bused across the border to stage pro-Russian demonstrations and beat Ukrainian students in the cities of eastern Ukraine. A final group of Russian citizens are former Ukrainian riot policemen who took part in the suppression of demonstrations. Having been rewarded for their actions with a Russian passport, they can and do travel to Russia. None of these groups, by any stretch of the imagination, could be plausibly described as a victimized minority requiring protection.
Putin and others blur the category of citizenship by speaking of Russian “compatriots,” a category that has no legal status. By compatriots Putin means people the Russian government claims as Russians—or who, according to the Kremlin, self-identify as Russians—and who therefore need its protection. This sort of argument, the need to protect the Volksgenossen, was used to significant effect by Adolf Hitler in 1938 in enunciating German claims to Austria and then to the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s substitution of ethnicity for state borders led then to the Munich conference, appeasement, and World War II. Russian historian Andrei Zubov has developed the comparison with Nazi aggression further, likening Putin’s action to the Anschluss, and recalling that the Anschluss led to a war that turned against its authors. The parallel has also been noted by the chief rabbi of Ukraine.
Even if the protection of Volksgenossen were legally justified, it is simply not clear who these people might be. It is true that Ukrainians speak Russian, but that does not make them Russian, any more than my writing in English makes me English. The language issue can be confusing. Ukrainian citizens are usually bilingual, in Ukrainian and Russian. Russians, like the targets of their propaganda, are rarely bilingual. So it has been all too easy to equate the capacity to speak Russian with a Russian identity that is in need of protection from Russia. Some citizens of Ukraine of course do see themselves as Russians—about 17 percent of the population—but this does not mean that they are subject to discrimination or indeed that they identify with the Russian state. Even in Crimea, where the emotional connections to the Ukrainian state are weakest, only 1 percent of the population identifies Russia as its homeland.
In a number of recent protests, Russian-speaking Ukrainians and members of the Russian ethnic minority in eastern Ukraine have made clear they categorically reject any claim that they need Russian protection. One petition from Russian speakers and Russians in Ukraine asks Putin to leave Ukrainian citizens alone to solve their own problems. It has been signed by 140,000 people. This might seem remarkable, since everyone signing it knows that he or she will be in the bad graces of the Russian authorities if Russia completes its invasion. But it makes perfect sense. Russians in Ukraine enjoy basic political rights, whereas Russians in the Russian Federation do not.
Sergii Kharchenko/NurPhoto/Corbis
Unmarked Russian forces surrounding a Ukrainian marine base in Perevalne, Crimea, March 6, 2014
In view of its patent absurdity, why is this propaganda so important to Putin’s regime? Most obviously, propaganda serves the technical purpose of preparing the way for war. An excellent propaganda apparatus, such as the Russian one, can find ways to repeat its message over and over again in slightly different ways and formats. Plenty of people in the West now spread Russian propaganda, sometimes for money, sometimes from ignorance, and sometimes for reasons best known to themselves. Those who repeat the Russian propaganda conceits do not need to convince everyone, only to set the terms of debate. If people in free societies have their discussions framed for them by rulers of unfree societies, then they will not notice the history unfolding around them (a revolution just happened in Europe!) or sense the urgency of formulating policy in a desperate situation (a European country has just invaded another!). Propaganda can serve this technical purpose no matter how absurd it is.
But propaganda has a deeper and more important function. Propaganda, at least in the old Soviet Union, was not an edited version of reality, but rather a crucial part of the endeavor to create a different reality. When we refute propaganda with facts and arguments, and even when we discuss its social function, we are inhabiting a certain mental world; we accept the constraints of observation and reason at the outset and seek to change our situation on the basis of what we think we can see and understand. But this is not the only possible psychic reality. In the Soviet Union, the assumption among many who believed in the promise of communism was that the future was as real if not more real than the present. Soviet propaganda was not a version of the world in which we live but rather a representation of the world to come. When we see Russia’s current propaganda in this way, we understand why its authors are utterly untroubled by what might appear to be factual errors and contradictions.
Take the idea of Jewish Nazis, which must be taken on if the current Kremlin propaganda about the revolution in Kiev is to have any logical basis. The claim is that Nazis made a coup; the observable reality is that some of the people now in power are Jews. And then we evince our skepticism that Jews are Nazis or that a Nazi coup would put Jews at the top of the Ukrainian state apparatus.
But in the ideology of the Soviet Union and its communist allies, the identification of Jews with Nazis was convenient for those who were in power, and so Jewish Nazis became a propaganda reality. In the years before Stalin’s death Israel became part of an international plot that was directed by fascists in the capitalist West. After the Six-Day War the Soviets presented Israeli soldiers and citizens as imitators of the Wehrmacht and the SS. This propaganda was followed by the expulsion of Jews from communist Poland. The fact that Jews left Poland for Israel and the US was presented as evidence that they were fascists all along. The regimes found it politically useful for their own future to target Jews, and therefore Jews, so to speak, were made to become Nazis.
Propaganda is thus not a flawed description, but a script for action. If we consider Putin’s propaganda in these Soviet terms, we see that the invasion of Crimea was not a reaction to an actual threat, but rather an attempt to activate a threat so that violence would erupt that would change the world. Propaganda is part of the action it is meant to justify. From this standpoint, an invasion from Russia would lead to a Ukrainian nationalist backlash that would make the Russian story about fascists, so to speak, retrospectively true. If Ukraine is unable to hold elections, it looks less like a democracy. Elections are scheduled, but cannot be held in regions occupied by a foreign power. In this way, military action can make propaganda seem true. Even the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe is unable to fulfill an observation mission.
Indeed, in his March 4 press conference, Putin claimed that the Ukrainian state no longer exists as such, and therefore is not protected by treaties or law. This is quite a radical position, recalling the conclusions that Nazi lawyers drew about Poland after the German invasion of that country in 1939. The position of statelessness would seem to authorize any military action whatsoever without legal restrictions, since Ukraine is in this view a lawless zone.
When the parliament of the Russian Federation (in an appropriately old-fashioned Soviet-style unanimous vote) authorized Putin to use military force throughout Ukraine, it defined the war aim as the restoration of “social and political normality.” This is effective rhetoric, as it slips in the implication that what is actually happening in the world, the actual politics and society of actual Ukraine, is not normal. It is also a formulation with terrifying implications. How much violence and how many generations would be necessary before Ukraine society was “normalized,” that is, until the supposedly artificial and Western idea of democracy was eliminated, and the supposedly invented Ukrainian national identity was forgotten? The costs to Russians and Ukrainians alike would be staggering, almost unbelievable.
We might not see the new reality that the Russian propaganda is preparing the ground for, but it seems likely that Putin, at least at times, is already inhabiting it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel—an East German and a Russian speaker who knows a thing or two about communism—has remarked that Putin was living “in another world.” But what if the propaganda, as effective as it has been in dulling the sensibilities of Westerners, fails to bring that world into being?
As Putin sat slouched in his chair at his press conference, shifting between clever one-liners and contradictory constructions, he seemed to be struggling to reconcile tactics and ideology. On the one hand, he has been an extremely good tactician, far more nimble and ruthless than almost anyone with whom he deals. He carried off his plan in Crimea with panache. He broke all the rules in an act of violence that should have opened a space for the true world, the world he wants, the glorious Russian gathering of Russian lands and peoples.
Yet dramatic action did not summon the envisioned new reality to life. Ukraine did not reveal itself to be a Russian land unhappily and temporarily ruled by a few fascists whose coup could be undone. It looks instead like a place where the revolutionary mood has been consolidated by a foreign invasion. As the chief rabbi of Ukraine put it a few days ago: “There were many differences of opinion throughout the revolution, but today all that is gone.” He continued: “We’re faced by an outside threat called Russia. It’s brought everyone together.”
There are now protests against the Russian occupation throughout the country, even in the south and east, where most people watch Russian television and where the economy is closely linked to Russia. Ukrainians who just a few days ago were in conflict with one another over their own revolution are now protesting together under the same flag. There have been violent clashes, as for example in Kharkiv, but these have been caused by busloads of Russians brought from across the border. It seems unlikely that the beatings of Ukrainian students by Russian “tourists” (as the Ukrainians, with typical humor, call them) will lead Ukrainians to think that they are Russian compatriots.
The unmarked uniforms of the Russian special forces in Crimea tell this story all by themselves. Theirs was supposed to be the rapid gesture that changed the world. But with each day that passes those ski masks and unmarked uniforms look instead like symbols of shame, hesitation, lack of responsibility—indeed denial of reality. In the Crimean sunshine black ops begin to look a little gray. It must have been enjoyable for Putin to run an operation in which his troops could pretend to be from nowhere. But it was oddly childish of him to deny, in his press conference, what everyone knew: that the troops were Russians. It was as though he wanted the tactical play to last as long as possible, to dream just a bit longer. Ukrainian sailors in Crimea answered him quite sharply, in brisk Russian sentences much better formulated than Putin’s own.
The costs of what Russia has done are very real, for Europe, for Ukraine, and for Russia itself. Russian propaganda has elegantly provided a rationale for Russian tactics and articulately defined a Russian dream for Ukraine. But in the end propaganda is all that unites the tactics and the dream, and that unity turns out to be wishful. There is no actual policy, no strategy, just a talented and tortured tyrant oscillating between mental worlds that are connected only by a tissue of lies. Putin faces a choice: use far more violence, in the hope that another surge will finally make the dream come true, or seek an exit in which he can claim some victory—which would be wise but deflating. He appears to feel the weight of this choice.
March 7, 2014, 1:25 p.m.
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Ukrainians deserve to be free of foreign aggression and given time to reform their government. They are hardly in a state of anarchy. Putin does not understand that a country can still function, at least temporarily without a leader. He doesn't understand what delegading powers to a legislative body means because he is a modern day despot. He has more absolute power at his disposal than most Western leaders. The people of Russia have few freedoms. What about the parts of his country that have been demanding freedom from Russia for years? Will he respect their democratic vote to secede from Russia?
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There are 'conceits' contained in your article above for example it talks about the snipers but as the link i posted show of the leaked phone conversations the snipers were hired by the new oligargichal leaders
Also israeli military have been involved
The uprising has been orchestrated by the network i've spoken about. They ARE fascists. Putin is going to allow the people of crimea a vote to determine if they want ot go to NATO or the russian federation
So Putin wasn't the initial foriegn aggression...the initial foreign aggression came fro the cabal controlled demonstrations
But i don't think that will be the end of thing because there are many people in the east of ukraine who are pro-russian so now we will see them agitate and want to break free from the new ukrainian government
The new ukrainian governemnt are puppets of the central bankers...they are not representative of the people
I think there will be more and more talk soon about states in the US seceeding from the US...it will be interesting to see what happens
[video=youtube;ZdTDdYHDrxk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdTDdYHDrxk[/video]
http://intellihub.com/us-presidential-candidate-dennis-kucinich-says-us-instigated-ukraine-crisis/
[h=1]US Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich says US instigated Ukraine Crisis[/h]
[h=3]Former congressman says that “U.S. taxpayers’ money was used to knock off an elected government in Ukraine”[/h] [h=6]By Staff Writer[/h] WASHINGTON (INTELLIHUB) — Tuesday evening while speaking to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich dropped information on the situation that is rarely heard in the mainstream media.
In the interview, Kucinich revealed that the United States government was guilty of funding some of the violent rebel groups who have overrun the country.
When asked how he would handle the crisis if he were president, Kucinich replied by saying that:
“What I’d do is not have USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy working with U.S. taxpayers’ money to knock off an elected government in Ukraine, which is what they did. I wouldn’t try to force the people of Ukraine into a deal with NATO against their interest or into a deal with the European Union, which is against their economic interest.”
So, it’s the USA’s fault that Putin rolled in? We made them do it?” O’Reilly replied.
“Bill O’Reilly, if you don’t believe in cause and effect, I don’t know what I can do for you,” Kucinich said.
Kucinich is known to be staunchly anti-war, he has also been an outspoken critic of trade agreements like NAFTA and organizations like the EU.
Kucinich is the only congressional representative to vote against the “9/11 Commemoration” resolution. In a press statement he defended his vote by saying that the bill did not make reference to “the lies that took us into Iraq, the lies that keep us there, the lies that are being used to set the stage for war against Iran and the lies that have undermined our basic civil liberties here at home.”
Like all politicians, Kucinich certainly isn’t perfect, despite his views against war and drug prohibition, Kucinich is in favor of heavy taxation and regulation, including strict gun control regulations.
Kucinich drafted legislation that included a ban on the purchase, sale, transfer, or possession of handguns by civilians.[SUP]
[/SUP]
Kucinich pushed for gun control, in the U.S. Congress as well as during his time as a city councilman. He kept a pistol in his house for a period in 1978 (under the recommendation of the police) when he was the target of a Mafia plot. He reportedly no longer keeps the pistol, but you can be certain that his body guards have heavy fire power.
[h=1]US Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich says US instigated Ukraine Crisis[/h]
[h=3]Former congressman says that “U.S. taxpayers’ money was used to knock off an elected government in Ukraine”[/h] [h=6]By Staff Writer[/h] WASHINGTON (INTELLIHUB) — Tuesday evening while speaking to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich dropped information on the situation that is rarely heard in the mainstream media.
In the interview, Kucinich revealed that the United States government was guilty of funding some of the violent rebel groups who have overrun the country.
When asked how he would handle the crisis if he were president, Kucinich replied by saying that:
“What I’d do is not have USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy working with U.S. taxpayers’ money to knock off an elected government in Ukraine, which is what they did. I wouldn’t try to force the people of Ukraine into a deal with NATO against their interest or into a deal with the European Union, which is against their economic interest.”
So, it’s the USA’s fault that Putin rolled in? We made them do it?” O’Reilly replied.
“Bill O’Reilly, if you don’t believe in cause and effect, I don’t know what I can do for you,” Kucinich said.
Kucinich is known to be staunchly anti-war, he has also been an outspoken critic of trade agreements like NAFTA and organizations like the EU.
Kucinich is the only congressional representative to vote against the “9/11 Commemoration” resolution. In a press statement he defended his vote by saying that the bill did not make reference to “the lies that took us into Iraq, the lies that keep us there, the lies that are being used to set the stage for war against Iran and the lies that have undermined our basic civil liberties here at home.”
Like all politicians, Kucinich certainly isn’t perfect, despite his views against war and drug prohibition, Kucinich is in favor of heavy taxation and regulation, including strict gun control regulations.
Kucinich drafted legislation that included a ban on the purchase, sale, transfer, or possession of handguns by civilians.[SUP]
[/SUP]
Kucinich pushed for gun control, in the U.S. Congress as well as during his time as a city councilman. He kept a pistol in his house for a period in 1978 (under the recommendation of the police) when he was the target of a Mafia plot. He reportedly no longer keeps the pistol, but you can be certain that his body guards have heavy fire power.
http://theweek.com/article/index/257646/no-ukraine-is-not-being-run-by-fascists
No, Ukraine is not being run by fascists
In fact, Vladimir Putin may be projecting a bit
By Peter Weber | March 7, 2014
Russia and its deposed Ukrainian ally, former President Viktor Yanukovych, have a special word for the protesters and opposition members of parliament that ousted him: fascists.
The epithet "fascist" holds special meaning in Russia, whose Soviet army lost some 8.7 million soldiers and many millions more civilians in the war against Nazi Germany. But evoking the specter of Adolf Hitler is not particularly helpful in determining what Putin means exactly and whether there's any truth to his claim.
So, for starters, what is fascism?
There have been entire books written on the subject, but some common characteristics of fascist governments include extreme, quasi-religious nationalism; a highly autocratic leader; control of the media and fierce suppression of dissent; a focus on race; an expansionist or nostalgically imperialist foreign policy; cronyism; and an emphasis on military strength and might. Fascists, formally speaking, oppose socialism/communism (too egalitarian, not nationalist enough) and capitalism (too inefficient and hard to control).
Do the interim leaders of Ukraine fit that bill? Most members of the coalition government – such as acting President Oleksandr Turchyno, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko, and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov – are from the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) Party, headed by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. The Batkivshchyna Party has a populist, pro-Europe bent, mixing support for freer markets with a call for greater assistance for the poor.
Tymoshenko is an early frontrunner in the May 25 presidential race, along with millionaire businessman/politician Petro Poroshenko and former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko. Klitschko, considered a political outsider, is a member of the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) but not part of the coalition government. He heads up the center-right Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR – or "Punch" in Ukrainian), which holds 40 seats in parliament. UDAR is also pro-Europe, virulently anti-corruption, and favors more expansive welfare policies.
None of these people can be called fascists. If you use a looser definition of fascist – say, a group with extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice – then there are actually elements of fascism in the interim government. Yatsenyuk's cabinet includes members of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) Party and the even-further-right Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), some of them in relatively high positions.
Svoboda has fascist roots, starting as the Social-National Party of Ukraine in the early 1990s. It kept that name until 2004, at which point party leader Oleh Tyahnybok was still giving speeches urging Ukrainians to fight the "Muscovite-Jewish mafia." The Wolfsangel (the swastika-esque symbol to the right), popular with neo-Nazis, was the party's logo until 2003. But the party has slowly been moderating over the years, especially since Tyahnybok took over in 2004.
By distancing itself from anti-semitism, moderating its more radical platforms, and focusing on corruption, Svoboda won 10 percent of the vote for parliament in the 2012 election. Svoboda formed an opposition coalition with Batkivshchyna and UDAR, and that coalition held when the Maidan protests started in November 2013. By January, Tyahnybok was one of the protest's three leaders, along with Batkivshchyna's Yatsenyuk and Klitschko.
The ouster of Yanukovych provided an unexpected path to power for Svoboda, whose members now head the defense, agriculture, and environment ministries; party ideological chief Oleksandr Sych is deputy prime minister. Dmytro Yarosh, the head of Pravy Sektor, is deputy secretary for national security.
The political ascendance of far-right nationalists is largely attributable to their key, often belated role in the anti-Yanukovych protest. If Tyahnybok was one of the Maidan protest's leaders, Pravy Sektor earned respect for providing much of the muscle that kept the riot police at bay or even took the fight to the security forces.
In all, according to an AntiFascist Union Ukraine member, about 30 percent of the Maidan protesters were Pravy Sektor members, neo-Nazis, and other hard-core nationalists. But that's not too surprising: If you drew a Venn diagram of Ukrainian far-right nationalists and people who oppose Russia and Yanukovych, there would be almost total overlap.
But you can't say that these right-wing nationalists – even if they are fascists – are in charge in Ukraine. None of them have near the support to win the presidency, and Svoboda is ultimately unlikely to wield much more influence in Ukraine than the National Front in France or the British National Party in the U.K.
There are racist, anti-Semitic, violent, thuggish, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and other unsavory elements in Svoboda and Pravy Sektor. But the accusations of fascism are a little rich coming from Putin and Yanukovych.
"The protests in the Maidan, we are told again and again by Russian propaganda and by the Kremlin's friends in Ukraine, mean the return of National Socialism to Europe," said Timothy Snyder in The New York Review of Books, right before Yanukovych's fall from power. But some of Putin's top advisers promote a form of "National Bolshevism" that looks an awful lot like fascism, Snyder added. And it was Yanukovych's regime "rather than its opponents that resorts to anti-Semitism, instructing its riot police that the opposition is led by Jews."
In other words, the Ukrainian government is telling itself that its opponents are Jews and us that its opponents are Nazis... Why exactly do people with such views think they can call other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously?... What does it mean when the wolf cries wolf? Most obviously, propagandists in Moscow and Kiev take us for fools – which by many indications is quite justified. [NY Review of Books]
Unless Russia occupies more of Ukraine, that country will hold relatively free and fair elections on May 25, almost certainly leading to a divided government with multiple centers of power and opposition, covered by various media outlets representing different points of view. In Russia, Putin has been either president or prime minister for 15 years, carefully cultivates a strongman image, and seems to want to re-create the Russian empire of yore. He may not be a fascist per se, but there seems to be an element of projection here.
So when Russia says Ukraine is being run by dangerous fascists, they aren't being literal about it. "Fascists," in this context, translates roughly to what President Obama's opponents mean when they call him a "socialist": I don't like you or agree with what I believe you stand for.
No, Ukraine is not being run by fascists
In fact, Vladimir Putin may be projecting a bit
By Peter Weber | March 7, 2014
Russia and its deposed Ukrainian ally, former President Viktor Yanukovych, have a special word for the protesters and opposition members of parliament that ousted him: fascists.
The epithet "fascist" holds special meaning in Russia, whose Soviet army lost some 8.7 million soldiers and many millions more civilians in the war against Nazi Germany. But evoking the specter of Adolf Hitler is not particularly helpful in determining what Putin means exactly and whether there's any truth to his claim.
So, for starters, what is fascism?
There have been entire books written on the subject, but some common characteristics of fascist governments include extreme, quasi-religious nationalism; a highly autocratic leader; control of the media and fierce suppression of dissent; a focus on race; an expansionist or nostalgically imperialist foreign policy; cronyism; and an emphasis on military strength and might. Fascists, formally speaking, oppose socialism/communism (too egalitarian, not nationalist enough) and capitalism (too inefficient and hard to control).
Do the interim leaders of Ukraine fit that bill? Most members of the coalition government – such as acting President Oleksandr Turchyno, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko, and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov – are from the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) Party, headed by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. The Batkivshchyna Party has a populist, pro-Europe bent, mixing support for freer markets with a call for greater assistance for the poor.
Tymoshenko is an early frontrunner in the May 25 presidential race, along with millionaire businessman/politician Petro Poroshenko and former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko. Klitschko, considered a political outsider, is a member of the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) but not part of the coalition government. He heads up the center-right Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR – or "Punch" in Ukrainian), which holds 40 seats in parliament. UDAR is also pro-Europe, virulently anti-corruption, and favors more expansive welfare policies.
None of these people can be called fascists. If you use a looser definition of fascist – say, a group with extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice – then there are actually elements of fascism in the interim government. Yatsenyuk's cabinet includes members of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) Party and the even-further-right Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), some of them in relatively high positions.
Svoboda has fascist roots, starting as the Social-National Party of Ukraine in the early 1990s. It kept that name until 2004, at which point party leader Oleh Tyahnybok was still giving speeches urging Ukrainians to fight the "Muscovite-Jewish mafia." The Wolfsangel (the swastika-esque symbol to the right), popular with neo-Nazis, was the party's logo until 2003. But the party has slowly been moderating over the years, especially since Tyahnybok took over in 2004.
By distancing itself from anti-semitism, moderating its more radical platforms, and focusing on corruption, Svoboda won 10 percent of the vote for parliament in the 2012 election. Svoboda formed an opposition coalition with Batkivshchyna and UDAR, and that coalition held when the Maidan protests started in November 2013. By January, Tyahnybok was one of the protest's three leaders, along with Batkivshchyna's Yatsenyuk and Klitschko.
The ouster of Yanukovych provided an unexpected path to power for Svoboda, whose members now head the defense, agriculture, and environment ministries; party ideological chief Oleksandr Sych is deputy prime minister. Dmytro Yarosh, the head of Pravy Sektor, is deputy secretary for national security.
The political ascendance of far-right nationalists is largely attributable to their key, often belated role in the anti-Yanukovych protest. If Tyahnybok was one of the Maidan protest's leaders, Pravy Sektor earned respect for providing much of the muscle that kept the riot police at bay or even took the fight to the security forces.
In all, according to an AntiFascist Union Ukraine member, about 30 percent of the Maidan protesters were Pravy Sektor members, neo-Nazis, and other hard-core nationalists. But that's not too surprising: If you drew a Venn diagram of Ukrainian far-right nationalists and people who oppose Russia and Yanukovych, there would be almost total overlap.
But you can't say that these right-wing nationalists – even if they are fascists – are in charge in Ukraine. None of them have near the support to win the presidency, and Svoboda is ultimately unlikely to wield much more influence in Ukraine than the National Front in France or the British National Party in the U.K.
There are racist, anti-Semitic, violent, thuggish, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and other unsavory elements in Svoboda and Pravy Sektor. But the accusations of fascism are a little rich coming from Putin and Yanukovych.
"The protests in the Maidan, we are told again and again by Russian propaganda and by the Kremlin's friends in Ukraine, mean the return of National Socialism to Europe," said Timothy Snyder in The New York Review of Books, right before Yanukovych's fall from power. But some of Putin's top advisers promote a form of "National Bolshevism" that looks an awful lot like fascism, Snyder added. And it was Yanukovych's regime "rather than its opponents that resorts to anti-Semitism, instructing its riot police that the opposition is led by Jews."
In other words, the Ukrainian government is telling itself that its opponents are Jews and us that its opponents are Nazis... Why exactly do people with such views think they can call other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously?... What does it mean when the wolf cries wolf? Most obviously, propagandists in Moscow and Kiev take us for fools – which by many indications is quite justified. [NY Review of Books]
Unless Russia occupies more of Ukraine, that country will hold relatively free and fair elections on May 25, almost certainly leading to a divided government with multiple centers of power and opposition, covered by various media outlets representing different points of view. In Russia, Putin has been either president or prime minister for 15 years, carefully cultivates a strongman image, and seems to want to re-create the Russian empire of yore. He may not be a fascist per se, but there seems to be an element of projection here.
So when Russia says Ukraine is being run by dangerous fascists, they aren't being literal about it. "Fascists," in this context, translates roughly to what President Obama's opponents mean when they call him a "socialist": I don't like you or agree with what I believe you stand for.
Like your article says there are a number of defintions of fascism. For me personally i see fascism as a merging of government and corporate power backed up by a totalitarian police state
I would go further than Putin and argue we are seeing a rise of fascism right across the west
I would go further than Putin and argue we are seeing a rise of fascism right across the west